A federal judge in Texas ruled Friday that the Biden Administration cannot enforce its vaccine mandate for federal employees, issuing an injunction that halts the requirement nationwide.
Judge Jeffrey Brown found the president had no legal authority to require feds to get vaccinated, saying that while he has broad power over federal employment policies, those authorities aren’t sweeping enough to justify the September executive order that implemented the requirement.
“The court notes at the outset that this case is not about whether folks should get vaccinated against COVID-19—the court believes they should,” he wrote. “It is not even about the federal government’s power, exercised properly, to mandate vaccination of its employees. It is instead about whether the president can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment. That, under the current state of the law as just recently expressed by the Supreme Court, is a bridge too far.”
The government had told the court that federal employees could start being disciplined for being unvaccinated as soon as Jan. 21. The timing, the judge found, put those employees at risk of “imminent harm,” and required his order to take effect the same day.
In a 2017 piece in The New York Times, voting expert Ari Berman wrote, “The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed tactics that prevented blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups from voting. But fo...